FOI 16629-25 - S19(1) Arrests

Request:

Please could you let me know how many people were arrested by Northamptonshire police under section 19(1) of the Public Order Act 1986 in 2024?

Could you please provide the dates of the relevant arrests?

Response:

Northamptonshire Police made 2 arrests under S19(1) of the Public Order Act 1986 in 2024.

We are unable to provide dates for the arrests. See below.

Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires Northamptonshire Police, when refusing to provide information (because the information is exempt), to provide the applicant with a notice which:

(a) States that fact
(b) Specifies the exemption(s) in question and
(c) States (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption(s) applies.

The information is exempt from disclosure by virtue of the following exemption:

Section 40(2) – Personal Information

Section 40 pertains to third party personal data. This would not be released under the Freedom of Information Act unless there is a strong public interest. This is because any release would breach the Principles contained within Article 5(1) of the GDPR and Part 2 of the Data Protection Act 2018.

One of the main differences between the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act is that any information released under Freedom of Information is released into the public domain, not just to the individual requesting the information. As such, any release that identifies an individual through releasing their personal data, including third party personal data, is exempted unless there is a strong public interest in its release. The public interest is not what interests the public but what benefits the community as a whole.

Personal data is defined under the Data Protection Act as data that is biographical in nature, has the applicant as its focus and/or affects the data subject’s privacy in his or her personal, professional or business life.

Principle a of Article 5(1) states that information must be processed fairly, lawfully and in a transparent manner. In this case the individuals would have a reasonable expectation that information would not be processed if it resulted in their identification, or equally led an individual to be wrongfully identified as a consequence. The risk increases where numbers are low and timescales are recent. Disclosures which appear harmless, when pieced together with other disclosures, can be used in a ‘mosaic effect’ by third parties who may have access to additional information that would enable them to link the requested information to an individual.

Freedom of Information Act disclosures are to the world at large and will remain in the public domain indefinitely. Therefore, provision of this information would exceed the original Policing requirement for the processing of the information and would not be lawful or fair to the individuals in question.

It is for these reasons outlined above that I feel that Principle a would be breached by this disclosure and the Section 40 exemption remains in place. I am not obliged to consider any further Principle in my arguments. This is an absolute, class-based exemption and, as such, there is no requirement to consider the public interest test.

The numerical data presented in this response is an unaudited snapshot of unpublished data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.

Northamptonshire Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the production of statistical information for Freedom of Information responses.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when the data is used.

If you decide to write an article/use the enclosed data, we ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.